techno.blog("Dion")

It is even easier to annotate the planet now. The Geobloggers have hooked up Google Maps! and Flickr to easily add photos to locations.

All you have to do:

You can join in and add your own photos by following a couple of simple steps.

1. Add three tags to your photo, “geo:lat=xx.xxxx”,
   “geo:lon=xx.xxxx” and “geotagged”, where xx.xxxx are the decimal format
   for it’s lat and long position.

Example “geo:lat=53.013″, “geo:lon=-2.1756″ & “geotagged”

2. Then;
   • Fastest,
     in the description add a link to www.geobloggers.com (i.e. (<a
     href=”http://www.geobloggers.com”>geotagged</a>). From the
     photos own page (not the photo stream) click the link. geobloggers will
     automagically look up the photo you just came from and search the tags
     for the lat and long. Note: If the link doesn’t seem
     to work wait a couple of minutes and try again. Sometimes it takes a
     short while for the lon/lat tags to appear in the XML data I get back
     from the flickr API.
   • Slower, just wait. geobloggers picks
     up the RSS stream for all public photos tagged as “geotagged”. It does
     this once every 5 mins, but the RSS feed itself is updated far less
     often (as far as I can tell). As it only holds the last 10 pictures,
     it’s possible it’ll miss some this way, I’ll wrangle around this in the
     future.
3. errr…
4. that’s it.

or

1. If your camera records the GPS data in the Exif headers, tag your photo with “geocoded” and it’ll be grabbed from the RSS feed

Rocky Lhotka mentioned a short (8 minute) video called EPIC 2014. The video is from the year 2014, and explains how the web grows, how Google and Amazon take over and become Googlezon (after they buy TiVo). We learn that the NY Times ‘goes offline’ in spite of the new platform. EPIC is the final platform: “Evolving Personalized Information Construct”.

If you work for Google, Amazon, TiVo, Microsoft, Blogger, Friendster, or the NY Times you must be having a bit of a laugh! ;)

If you go to Google Maps! you will see that the world has grown. Now, there is more than the US and oceans. Scroll to the right and you will see that Tony Blair has a place on the earth ;)

It was fun to visit the homeland. I was looking forward to seeing the satelite view of my old house, but that data isn’t there yet.

You can go to Google Maps! UK directly.

Which country will be next?

ps. I know Canada is there… but that is Bush’s 51st state right? :)

I have been wanting more of a personal touch from Google for awhile, and it looks like they are coming up with the goods.

Google Labs just came out with Search History, in beta.

Now you can choose to tell Google to watch over you and help out.

There are definitely privacy issues surrounding some of the more ‘out there’ personal search features (e.g. social networking ‘those who searched also searched’) but it is great to see this first step, and I look forward to more!

I always like the integrated experience with Google. When I sign up for something I don’t have to go to a DIFFERENT place. www.google.com is still the entry point and it just knows that I want a personal touch.

The cool usage of Google Maps as a platform has continued with this very cool merge of Craigslist with Maps.

Now only do you see the housing in an area on the map, but it even shows images (if there are any) in the popups.

We keep annotating the web!

Angsuman Chakraborty is putting together the pieces of recent Google projects and acquisitions (like every other analyst) in Is there a method to Google

A friend pointed me to http://yagoohoogle.com/.

Not sure which search engine to use? Use both :)

I wonder when YaGooHoogleMSN.com will come about?

You also have to watch out. If you put in a ” the whole thing breaks as it doesn’t escape it, and the frame src gets messed ;)

A friend pointed out the new ‘Satellite’ link on Google Maps.

Go to an address and hit it to see it kick in!

That is very very cool.

Now I just want Google to be more personalized friendly… and let me save common places so I don’t have to type my damn home address in all the time when I do directions ;)

Oh, and it will be really nice to get more map data in there (satellite runs out in many places, and europe will be a nice addition too ;)

And, wouldn’t it be nice to have state lines, lines around cities, etc etc. It can be hard to know what you are looking at sometimes when all you see is Satellite data.

It doesn’t even remember what you have typed before.

It is cool how the satellite work can piggy back off of the standard maps. Instead of mt.google.com there is now kh.google.com which returns the squares as satellite images rather than 2D maps. It is also interesting to see the subtle Google copyright as a watermark.

It was cool to read about Google implementing Mozilla prefetching for the top hits of a search.

This could be really useful in any web application. Many times you know the common paths of your users, so why not speed things up and let the browser do its PreFetch Thang when your idle user is reading away.

Many people have argued over what content an aggregator can show of a companies site.

Obvious questions come from how much of an RSS feed can you show.

Also, Google’s ‘cache’ comes into question. Can they display the entire content of sites?

What is fair use? What is allowed?

AFP sues Google over news copyright

The future of aggregated news sites supplied by internet companies such as Google was called into question today when it emerged Agence France-Presse had sued the world